Traveling in Pursuit of Theater

Since I live in New York City, I usually don't take a "theater
vacation"-you know, the eight-shows-a-week type of trip to New York or London. Even when I go to London, theater is just
one of the activities on my itinerary. But the last three summers, I have found
myself in a summer theater destination and have been appreciating more and more
the joy of taking my No. 1 pastime on the road.

Last August, I extended a trip to
Niagara Falls to the charming resort town
Niagara-on-the-Lake, 18 miles north of the falls and home to the annuAl Shaw
Festival, one of Canada's most prestigious theater
ensembles. I saw Merrily We Roll
Along and The House of Bernarda
Alba. This year, the Shaw Festival presents 11 plays on its three stages
from April 3 to Nov. 30, including Misalliance; the Kaufman-Ferber comedy
The Royal Family; The Plough and the Stars, by Sean
O'Casey; Chekhov's Three Sisters;
Brian Friel's Chekhov-inspired Afterplay; a Lizzie Borden post-trial
bio, Blood Relations; and the
musicals On the Twentieth Century and
Happy End. (www.shawfest.com)

In July 2001, I took a cruise on the RhoneRiver in southern France that included a day in Avignon. The city's been
at the forefront of worldwide theater news recently, as an actors and
technicians strike has forced the cancellation of the 57th Festival d'Avignon,
one of two arts festivals held there every July. Together, the Festival
d'Avignon and Festival Off-what we in the States might call a "Fringe
Festival"-offer more than 500 productions in over 100 venues; in Festival Off, a
performance starts approximately every 15 minutes from 10 a.m. to midnight. I
selected Georges Feydeau's Mais n'te
promene donc pas toute nue! (en anglais: Don't Walk Around Naked! [they didn't]).
If you're going to watch a play in a language you don't completely understand, a
sex farce may be your best bet since you can get a gist of the plot from the
physical antics. And I could still tell the acting was tres bon. (www.festival-avignon.com

After dabbling in theater away from
home, this year I finally decided to take a vacation getaway planned around
theatergoing. New Yorkers and Bostonians have a great theater destination just
three hours away: the Berkshire region of western Massachusetts. I stayed only
two nights on my recent trip but saw four shows: one from the classical canon, a
modern comedy, a musical and a fairly new one-man play. The quantity of theater
in the Berkshires has grown so much that the area now promotes itself as
"America's Premier Cultural Resort." Other performing arts have something to do
with that: The Berkshires, after all, are probably best-known for Tanglewood,
the outdoor summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (and famous in theater
circles as the place where Leonard Bernstein's career was launched). The region
also offers a host of other music and dance festivals and concert and
performance series.

But it's
far from the only game in town for theatergoers. Decades before Williamstown
grabbed the spotlight, the Berkshire
Theatre Festival brought stars and top-quality theater to the region, and
it's still going strong after 75 years. Richard Chamberlain is currently
appearing there as a diplomat in crisis in the world premiere of The Stillborn Lover by Timothy Findley.
Other dramas on BTF's 2003 schedule are Talley's Folly, by Lanford Wilson, and a
new staging of Peter Pan, co-adapted
by Trevor Nunn. Although BTF seems to draw an older audience, it does not shy
away from edgy fare: This summer's musicals are Assassins and The Who's Tommy, and both The Stillborn Lover and one of the plays
I saw, Nijinsky's Last Dance, contain
nude scenes.

Nijinsky's Last
Dance and Enter Laughing, the other BTF show I
saw earlier this summer, have concluded their runs. Directed by Joe Calarco, who
did Shakespeare's R&J
off-Broadway, Nijinsky was staged in
BTF's smaller, arena-style Unicorn Theatre and featured a bravura performance by
Jeremy Davidson re-enacting the momentous yet tortured life of ballet dancer
Vaslav Nijinsky, one of the 20th century's first international celebrities. Enter Laughing, the Carl Reiner
autobiographical novel that was adapted for the stage by Joseph Stein (just
before he wrote the book for Fiddler on
the Roof), was cleverly reimagined in "meta" style by director Scott
Schwartz: To underscore the comedy's passion-for-theater theme, he made the
audience extra aware of the actors' craft by doubling up roles for cast members,
keeping lights up as they moved scenery and furnishing upstage like the inside
of a theater.

The Berkshire Theatre Festival
still performs in its original building, the former Stockbridge Casino designed
by legendary architect Stanford White, which is now listed on the National
Register of Historic Places. The company's first production, in 1928, starred
Eva LeGallienne; in 1930, as a member of BTF's apprentice program, Katharine
Hepburn had tiny roles in three plays. Among those who also have trod the boards
at BTF over the years are Gloria Swanson, Jose Ferrer, Maureen Stapleton and
Cicely Tyson.

One of the Berkshires' newer
theater producers is the Barrington
Stage Company, which performs at the Consolati Performing Arts Center (a
high school auditorium) in Sheffield. This summer-BSC's ninth season-features
two world premieres: The Game, a
musical version of Les Liaisons
Dangereuses, and Mark St. Germain's Ears on a Beatle, about two FBI agents
tailing John Lennon in the 1970s. The latter stars Dan Lauria, the father on
TV's The Wonder Years, and Bill
Dawes, who appeared in Gross
Indecency in New York. BSC is also presenting two plays recently seen
off-Broadway, Lobby Hero by Kenneth
Lonergan and Neil LaBute's The Shape of
Things, as well as the musical Once
Upon a Mattress in its family series (with performances in both Sheffield
and Pittsfield).

BSC's first show this summer was Funny Girl, now in the final week of its
run. It's an ambitious and pleasurable production of a play that is so heavily identified with one performer it seemingly discourages
revivals. But Jeanne Goodman fearlessly makes Fanny Brice her own; the times she
does resemble Barbra Streisand are probably less the result of imitation than of
her being ideally suited for the role. To say Goodman was born to play Fanny is
not an overstatement, considering the extraordinary combination of vocal
demands (she sings almost every song in the show) and physical attributes
required for the part. Her Nicky Arnstein is a BSC favorite, Christopher Yates,
a leading man in the BSC productions of Cabaret and On the Twentieth Century.

Funny Girl is directed by Barrington Stage
Company founder Julianne Boyd, who directed Eubie! on Broadway in 1978-79 and
conceivedthe A…My Name Is Alice feminist musical
revues. Her Berkshires company has had amazing success in its first decade,
transferring Cabaret to the Hasty
Pudding Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., for an extended run and winning awards from
Massachusetts critics for such shows as Mack and Mabel, South Pacific, The Diary of Anne Frank, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill
and the American premiere of A View From
the Roof.

Another of the Berkshires'
acclaimed theater producers is Shakespeare & Company, which rode a
record-breaking 2002 box office into this season. Last year the organization
tallied a million dollars in ticket sales for the first time since it originated
in 1978, as a resident company of the Mount, Edith Wharton's chateau-like former
residence in Lenox. In those early years the company produced one outdoor
Shakespeare play and a parlor staging of Wharton stories each summer, but it now
offers a dozen productions from May to December. The 2003 program includes a Much Ado About Nothing set in 1950s
Sicily, King Lear, The Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by
only eight actors, Wharton's Ethan
Frome, Vita & Virginia and
the comic montage The Complete Works of
William Shakespeare (abridged). S&C has also brought back one of last
season's hits, The Fly-Bottle, about
philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, while a play
it sold out in 2002, Golda's Balcony,
is now Broadway-bound.

Shakespeare & Company left the
Mount in 2001 and now has its own home, a 63-acre property in Lenox with three
performance spaces (and more planned, including a replica of Shakespeare's Rose
Playhouse with surrounding Elizabethan village). One of those venues, the Spring
Lawn Theatre, is where I saw The Chekhov
One-Acts. This classical troupe has done Chekhov only once before, but this
year it replaced its usual Wharton one-acts with short works by the Russian
master. Like the Wharton pieces, the Chekhov plays have a drawing room ambience,
even if they don't all take place in a drawing room-so that's precisely where
they are performed. The Spring Lawn is actually a room in an old mansion, with a
rectangular section in the middle staked out as the stage, the audience seated
on two sides, and the room's fireplace, terrace and glass doors incorporated
into the set. (There's even complimentary tea and cookies in the foyer at
intermission.)

The standout among the four
one-acts is the closer, The Brute, in
which a farmer and the widow of the man who died in debt to him plan to settle
their disagreement with a duel. Miles Herter makes an incredible transformation
from his earlier appearance as a sickly, woeful clerk in The Celebration to his confident and
forceful character in The Brute, a
performance enhanced by Herter's sonorous voice. His adversary is played by
Diane Prusha, who also portrays an aging actress recalling her heyday in the
near-monologue Swan Song, an
interesting work marred by a translation that discordantly uses the F-word. The
true monologue The Harmfulness of
Tobacco gets laughs for performer Spencer Trova. All the playlets are
definitely Chekhovian, so how much you enjoy them may depend on how much you
enjoy that type of humor and drama; regardless, they showcase Shakespeare &
Company's exemplary production values (costumes and sets are lovely) and
consummate hand with literary theater.

Other theater companies in the
Berkshires area include Main Street Stage in North Adams, whose August
production is The Beauty Queen of
Leenane, and the Miniature Theatre of Chester, which is world-premiering The Darlings (the family from Peter Pan transplanted to present-day
Manhattan) and following it with the one-man show Bother!, based on the works of Winnie
the Pooh creator A.A. Milne.

What makes the Berkshires special
for such a theater-rich
destination-especially if you usually get your theater in a city-is that it's a
rural area. Right before getting ready for the theater, you may find yourself
hiking, biking or swimming in one of the region's many state parks or picking
your own fruit at an orchard. Yet the cultural immersion is not limited to the
entertainment: Among the historic sites to visit in the Berkshires are former
homes of Wharton, author Herman Melville, sculptor Daniel Chester French and
artist Norman Rockwell. For more information and links to all theaters and
attractions, go to www.berkshires.org.